Do's and don'ts · July 16, 2023 · 2 min read
The bike came after the race
Jay did his first 70.3 on the bike he already had, and the tri bike showed up a month later, after the race proved he'd keep doing this.
There's a version of starting triathlon in your forties or fifties that begins with a shopping cart, and we know because we've watched people do it. The bike is beautiful, the wetsuit is beautiful, and the first race is still a first race. We did it backwards, mostly by accident, and it turned out to be the right way around.
Honu on the old bike
Jay's first 70.3 was June 3, 2023, in the lava between Waikoloa and Hawi, and he rode the road bike he already had, the one that had done the long rides, the Haleiwa Metric Century, and the brick workouts up the hills. It had earned the race by being there for the training, and he finished on it. He was slow on the climb to Hawi because of the wind, and because he was fifty and only eleven months into taking any of this seriously, and the bike had less to do with it than you'd think.
Then the bike
In July, a month after Honu, the tri bike showed up, and it's in the second-week-of-July video along with new shoes and a snorkeling trip to Sharks Cove, because that's what a week looks like in a house where the season is long. By then the purchase made sense, since there was a sprint tri at the end of July, a 112-mile ride in August, and a full-distance decision on the horizon, so the bike had a job to do. A month after that Michelle had a proper bike fit, which is the other half of this lesson, because the fit mattered more than the frame and it should've come first for both of us.
The tri bike was a 2006 Cervelo P3 from a friend, and around the same time Jay picked up a Specialized Tarmac SL6 road bike off Facebook Marketplace. The reason was simple enough, because the bike is a huge portion of a triathlon and the bike is what broke him at Honu, making the run so hard to get into that it took 2:15, and if there was going to be another one he needed to be a lot stronger on the bike.
Why the order matters at this age
At this age we usually have the money to buy the thing before we've earned it, and that's the trap, because the gear makes the decision feel made, and then the first race is hard, the way first races are, and the bike ends up in a corner as a reminder. Race the first one on what you've got and let the race decide whether there's a second one, and then buy the bike and ride it a lot, alone, in the heat, before it ever sees a transition area.